


The Pain of Parting Ways

by hufflepuffkaspbrak



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Broken Promise, Friend Breakup, High School AU, M/M, Sad, Sad Richie, Unrequited Love, eddie leaves, just...feelings, warning there's almost no dialogue in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 23:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13064127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepuffkaspbrak/pseuds/hufflepuffkaspbrak
Summary: When sometimes love isn't enough to keep someone around.





	The Pain of Parting Ways

The saddest parting of ways is when nothing happens. There’s no big fight, there’s no person coming between them and tearing them apart, there’s no moving away, there’s just…fading. Where there was once hushed secrets and shared jokes, there’s only memories, random facts about the other person that will forever stay crammed in the back of your mind. Old belongings that burn a hole in a desk drawer, never to be returned. Little things here and there will pop up with connections to the person, but it’s no longer simple enough to send a picture and say, _“hey this reminds me of you”_.

Richie Tozier remembered that Eddie Kaspbrak’s favorite color was red. His favorite flavor of ice cream was strawberry (and he liked the little chunks of the fruit in it). He couldn’t sleep with socks and he needed to sleep on the side of his bed closest to the wall. Eddie snorted when he laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe and his favorite movie was _The Goonies_. His dream was to travel the world but he would settle for getting out of Derry.

But most of all, Richie Tozier remembered the way Eddie Kaspbrak made him feel. The way the shorter boy short circuited his brain and the only words that could come out of his mouth were crude jokes. Sometimes, Richie would look to his side when Eddie sat next to him and his eyes would flicker across the boy’s soft features, freckles littering his nose and gold sparkling in his eyes. But when Eddie turned to him, his cheeks would turn bright red and he would spit out smart remarks, his fiery temper getting the best of him, and it made Richie swoon.

Richie would swing his arm around Eddie’s shoulder just to feel a bit of the warmth from the boy’s body and he would pinch his sides, just to know how they felt beneath his fingers. Their friends never thought anything of it, it was just Richie being Richie, but eventually Bev caught on. After all, best friends couldn’t keep anything from each other.

Bev could see the happiness that shown in Richie’s eyes whenever Eddie walked into a room and the way his fingers tapped nervously on his thigh when he sat close to him. She noticed his body perking up ever so slightly when Eddie’s name was mentioned and the fact that he would always volunteer to go on errands with him.

But now, Richie sat in the cafeteria on a warm May day in his senior year, only weeks before graduation, Stan and Mike on one side of him and Bill on the other (Beverly and Ben were probably making out somewhere). His eyes never left Eddie, who sat on the opposite side of the room, table full of people who were strangers to Richie. People who they didn’t grow up with and didn’t know that Eddie poured his milk first and then his cereal like a heathen.

Eddie looked beautiful as ever, in a light-colored tee shirt that brought out his eyes and colorful shoes that matched his personality. His hair had grown out a bit, soft curls brushing his ears. He laughed at something someone said and reasonably Richie knew he couldn’t hear him, but the sound of his laughter rang through his ears anyways.

Richie doesn’t remember when Eddie stopped speaking to him. They weren’t in classes together this year but they didn’t have classes together freshman year either, so that couldn’t be it. Richie wasn’t very obvious with his feelings (Bev said he did a good job hiding them) and he never confessed, so Eddie couldn’t be creeped out with him. The other losers said that they didn’t have any sort of confrontation with him and it left Richie perplexed. That out of the blue, Eddie started showing up to the quarry less and less. He was busy more and more on the weekends and would occasionally ignore Richie in the halls. Eddie still spoke to them, but he seemed distant, leaving the conversation quickly to run after someone he saw pass by or suddenly remembering something he needed to do.

Richie remembered showing up randomly at Bev’s house one day after it had been nearly three weeks since Eddie spoke to him and despite Ben being there as well, he laid down on her bed and sobbed. Deep, convulsing sobs that made it hard for him to breathe and soaked Beverly’s sheets. Her and Ben sat on either side of him, Bev holding him close and Ben running his hands through his hair in an attempt to comfort him. He cried out, asking over and over again what he could’ve possibly done wrong to make Eddie, _his Eddie_ , who he had been friends with since kindergarten, hate him. To make him get up and leave.

Ben and Beverly tried to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. That any one of them could’ve done something wrong. Or maybe nothing was wrong at all and people just drift apart. At the latter statement, Richie just cried more. All this time he was thinking that something had happened to cause this but he couldn’t fathom that _nothing_ happened. That this was just the way fate meant for his life to play out. Was the world really so cruel as to tear them apart after everything they’d be through together? Did trust and love and loyalty and happiness mean nothing to the world? Or did it mean nothing to Eddie? Was it Eddie who decided he’d had enough, that he didn’t want to be around anymore?

After that day, Richie threw himself into his school work. Not in an unhealthy way, but the time he used to spent sitting around thinking _“what if?”_ were now dedicating to studying, trying to get into a good school so he could leave the little town he’d grown to hate. Beverly let him come over once a month to purge his feelings, cry and eat ice cream while watching shitty movies. Maybe it wasn’t healthy, but it helped him cope, it helped him live.

So now Richie sat, only weeks away from graduation, deposit already sent in to UCLA where he’d be rooming with Ben and Beverly. He stared at Eddie from across the room and wondered what the boy’s plans were. They made a promise once, on a late night in their sophomore year, to escape Derry by going to school in California, but Richie wondered if he remembered. Richie wondered if Eddie remembered anything about them in the way Richie remembered everything about him. Whether or not Eddie remembered was irrelevant to Richie, because he never once broke a promise. He was going to go to California with or without Eddie.

When graduation came along, Richie and his friends went to Richie’s basement and got wasted. The liquid poured passed their lips in waves, filling their minds with clouds that made them forget every misfortune they’d ever dealt with. Richie didn’t cry about Eddie, but, oh, did he talk about him. Richie turned into a poet, describing Eddie’s eyes with the most precise details and talking about how he didn’t know it was possible for one person to make another feel so alive by simply existing. And how one person could take another’s heart and shatter it without saying a word.

The losers didn’t say anything during this, just let Richie stand up on the couch and speak, gallivanting his arms everywhere, eyes glassy but tears never spilling. He drank as he spoke and slurred some words and the others lost count of the amount of times he said the word _“love”_. He _loved_ the way Eddie didn’t take his shit, he _loved_ the way Eddie knew random facts, he _loved_ the way Eddie picked on the hem of his shirt when he was nervous, he _loved_ Eddie. The others didn’t respond, but when Richie saw their looks of pity, his mood changed to _hate, hate, hate._

He _hated_ the way that Eddie just got up and left, he _hated_ the way Eddie didn’t even give him a second glance, he _hated_ the way that he couldn’t forget all the little things he knew about Eddie, but most of all, he _hated_ the way that he would never be able to tell Eddie that he loved him.

Richie ended up passing out on the couch, Eddie’s name still threatening to spill pass his lips, not quite in a sob but with more emotion than just being spoken. The others exchanged knowing looks and took the bottle from Richie, tucking him under a blanket, and going upstairs.

The summer went on like their senior year did. With them loving and supporting each other, but this time each hug was a little longer as the day they were to separate came closer and closer. Richie remembered that what he rambled on about that night but he was grateful that his friends never brought it up again. He continued to have his monthly crying sessions with Bev and briefly wondering when they would stop, considering he would be living with her after the summer ended.

On the day of the last crying session before the big move, he showed up to Beverly’s room to see not Beverly, Ben, or Stan (who had started to show up), but Eddie, sitting on her bed, legs curled up against his chest.

Richie remembered when he was younger he fell out of a tree and got the wind knocked out of him. He couldn’t breathe, not even to cry, and he felt panicked and scared. The emotion he felt when he saw Eddie was that times a hundred.

“Richie…” Eddie breathed out and Richie screamed.

He picked up the nearest thing to him, which happened to be an opened water bottle and threw it against the wall nearest to him, water splashing. Eddie didn’t flinch.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to college in Florida.”

Ringing started playing in Richie’s ears and he was sure Eddie was speaking but he couldn’t hear a word as tears streamed down his face and the entirety of the last year played through his mind. Then the entirety of his life played in his mind. The promises he made with Eddie and the secrets they shared and the love he felt and he thought about how he felt nothing but pain at the moment.

Richie turned around on his heel and walked out of the house, Eddie yelling behind him.

Maybe he wasn’t ever in love with Eddie, or maybe he was in love with Eddie before and he was just holding onto those memories like he could keep his Eds alive. But when the word _Florida_ was spoken in the room, Richie realized that his Eds was gone and wouldn’t come back. That he didn’t know why Eddie left and he may never know. All he knew was that where _Eds_ laid, Edward Kaspbrak stood and he was a man that Richie didn’t know.

He was a man that Richie had romanticized the shit out of and cried over and spent so much of his senior year thinking about. He had looked at every picture with the boy and tried to remember what life with him was like. But Richie was now realizing that that time was long gone. That no matter how much he hoped and begged, he life would never go back to how it was before. That he had loved Eddie Kaspbrak but Eddie Kaspbrak did not love him. That the love and adoration of six friends were not enough to keep the boy with them.

When Richie closed his eyes, he still saw Eddie laughing and Eddie walking with him and Eddie lying next to him during their sleepovers and Eddie just being beautiful. But when Richie opened his eyes, he knew that it was all just memories. He often wondered what Eddie was saying to him on the night in Beverly’s house but he realized he didn’t want to know. That it was probably something that would cause the final break in his heart that would leave him too far gone to ever be repaired.

It took several years but Richie eventually became content with leaving Eddie as a happy memory of someone who made him feel so much love and joy but was simply not meant to stay with him for reasons beyond him.  He would walk down the streets and see an ice cream parlor or a pharmacy or would see _The Goonies_ playing on TV and his mind would no longer stray to him. The memories had been shoved so far back into his head that they didn’t bring him sadness anymore, but they also didn’t bring him joy. Richie Tozier had become numb.


End file.
